Family
He was one of three sons born to Rudolph and Kate Abse; his older brother, Wilfred, became a psychoanalyst and held the Chair in Psychiatry at the University of Virginia; his younger brother Dannie is the distinguished poet and former President of the Poetry Society, In 1955 he married Marjorie Davies, an artist with a national reputation for her fabrique collage work and head of the pedagogic department at Cardiff College of Art. They had two children: Tobias, a lecturer in European History, and Bathsheba, one-time curator of the Keats Museum in Rome and now married to an Italian diplomat. After Marjorie’s death in 1996, he re-married in 2000 Ania Czepulkowska, a young Polish artist holding a Royal College Masters degree.
Early Background
Born in Cardiff April 1917, the grandson of Jewish immigrants who, in their twenties, had settled in Wales in the 1870s. Both sets of grandparents, one dominated by a secular atheist grandmother hailing from Köningsberg in Germany, the other by a Talmudic grandfather coming from Russian Poland, competed with each other to gain their grandchildren’s allegiance; within this extended family, babel prevailed; many languages were spoken - all imperfectly: Yiddish, a vernacular Welsh, a melange of Masurisch (a Baltic tongue), German and an oft-times strangulated English. When he was ten, his paternal grandfather, who had built up an empire of small cinemas in South Wales, died; in a remarkably short space of time, his sons’ incompetence and irresponsibility dissipated their inheritance; for a while his own father clung on to one ramshackle cinema but the bailiffs were ever in attendance; by the time he had finished at his secondary school, the family finances required him to go out to work in a factory; then, following the outbreak of war, he served in the RAF in the Middle East, East Africa and Italy.
Early politcal activities
As a boy he was politically influenced by his mother’s sister, Lily Tobias, the novelist and pacifist propagandist; he became chairman of Cardiff Young Socialists, joined the Labour Party at 17, enlisted as a member of the Transport & General Workers Union and then, at 21, the earliest eligible age, he fought as Labour candidate for a Council seat in the city of Cardiff; this was to be the first of 17 local and general elections where he was the candidate, probably more than any man in the twentieth century. In 1944, while serving with the RAF in the Middle East, he was arrested and detained for political activities following upon his contribution to the setting-up of a Forces Mock Parliament in Cairo - an episode that precipitated a parliamentary debate in Westminster. A definitive account of his arrest and subsequent release can be found in the autobiography of D N Pritt, QC, MP (Lawrence & Wishart, 1966). Returning to civil life, he soon became chairman of the Cardiff City Labour Party and that led to the Party taking control for the first time of the City Council, upon which he served as chairman of the Watch Committee and also chaired the governors of the city’s art college. In 1955 he unsuccessfully fought the safe Tory seat of Cardiff North but was later to be returned as Member of Parliament for Pontypool in a by-election in 1958. He remained uninterruptedly in Parliament for 29 years until his retirement at the age of 70.
Parliamentary activities
In 2008 Britain’s leading legal historian, Professor Stephen Cretney QC, a former Law Commissioner and Senior Research Fellow of All Souls, in his book Looking Back - Looking Forward: 150 Years of Family Law, OUP (2008), lauded Abse as a legislator who was a creative iconoclast and wrote of his contribution in the following terms:
Leo Abse: the most effective Law Reformer in 20th century Britain? One man, Leo Abse, a Cardiff solicitor (1), and a Labour Member of Parliament for the Welsh Constituencies for nearly 30 years, is an outstanding example of such a person (2): in Family Law in the twentieth century, A History I describe him as a ‘brilliantly skilled master of parliamentary procedures’ who ‘probably had a greater influence on the development of law relating to family matters than any other MP in the twentieth century.’ That is wrong: the word ‘probably’ should be deleted.
One thing is quite clear: Leo Abse undoubtedly qualifies as a ‘troublemaker. The summary of his career he gives in Who’s Who begins with a boast that his ‘arrest for political activities’ in 1944 whilst serving as an Aircraftman in the Royal Air Force ‘precipitated a parliamentary debate’. Service personnel in Cairo had organized, with the good will of the Authorities, a ‘Forces Parliament’ at which issues of the day (and especially the post-war future) such as the nationalization of the Banks were to be debated. Suddenly at the ‘Parliament’s’ second meeting a Brigadier appeared. He promulgated an order that the word ‘Parliament’ should not be used, that no civilians or press were to be present, and - worst of all – that the subjects to be discussed were to be supervised by the Army authorities and controlled by them. ‘Ringleaders’ including Abse were immediately ‘posted’, some to what were described as ‘really unpleasant places’ (3). Not perhaps a promising start. But once again ‘look at the achievements’.
First, there is the Divorce Reform Act 1969. Leo Abse (4): (says a Professor of Politics) was the ‘dominant figure’ in organizing support. ‘His colourful personality, his boundless energy, his contacts with the press and his close acquaintance with some Ministers were all of great importance (5). Second, decriminalizing homosexuality: it was his bill which on July 27 1967 finally achieved what he and others had campaigned for over a decade and more. The long campaign meant that the arguments had all been repeated ad nauseam, there was nothing left to say, and the ‘heat and vigour of the controversy had faded. So the final stages depended on Abse’s tactical skill in knowing when to compromise (notably by exempting the merchant shipping industry from the Bill to prevent their opposition bringing down the Bill).Professor Richards says that the eventual success ‘depended largely upon Abse’s crusading energy and his good personal relationships with some of the Ministers’ (6). Third, the Children Act 1975: now, in the wake of the Children Act 1989 and the Adoption and Children Act 2002, almost forgotten. But it is Abse who vigorously lobbied Home Secretary Callaghan (and his wife) (7) to set up the Houghton Committee on Adoption (8), promising Callaghan that he could go down in history as ‘the man who had revolutionized Britain’s Child Law (9). And it was that Report which led to acceptance of the idea of a nation-wide comprehensive adoption service, to ‘freeing for adoption, to an improved institutional framework for fostering and, perhaps most significant, the ‘right to know’ about adoption. And it was Abse who helped David Owen to produce a draft Bill (10) which became the catalyst for the 1975 Children Act. It was Abse who played a lead role in getting issues of assisted reproduction properly investigated, and thus to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 1990 (11). And there is all the rest, others, not perhaps Family Law as traditionally understood, decriminalizing suicide, provision of family planning, and so on.
James Callaghan was surely right to say (12) that Abse has done ‘much more good in terms of human happiness than 90% of the work done in Parliament on what is called “political issues”; and that is surely a sufficient reason for marking Leo Abse’s remarkable achievements. But there is another one: he has a deep understanding of what is possible within the constraints of the British Parliamentary system. First, he understands that a Member of Parliament must have an intuitive understanding of how far constituents are prepared for their MP to go. Take the perhaps trivial example of the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1970: the Law Commission, committed to the view that it was of ‘overriding importance’ to do away with litigation about who was to blame for ending a relationship, wanted to provide that a man should be entitled to get back an engagement ring even if he had jilted his fiancé. But Abse thought it quite wrong for ‘over-logical lawyers’ to trample on Women’s feelings’. Public reaction was ‘immediate, extensive and unanimous’ in supporting him (13). His ‘exasperated’ colleagues ‘sensed the danger of a flood engulfing the whole Bill’ and the Bill was accordingly amended. (14)
‘My wife, and womankind, had their way: and jilted girls [sic] can now keep their ring, sell them, throw them in the river or at their faithless lovers. My legal friends wondered that my eccentricity should be shared by so many: and despaired that a Bill drafted so neatly should only by becoming so untidy be acceptable to the absurd women of England and Wales.’ (15)
‘Up to a point’. But the issue of where that point is to be placed – think of capital punishment – is of course vital and cannot easily be answered in general terms. Abse has at least a partial answer. Perhaps rather uncharacteristically – because he would I think accept the view attributed to him by Professor Peter Richards (16) that ‘the only way to achieve social reform in a parliamentary context is to persevere, to nag and nag, and to keep nagging away’ – Abse draws attention to the need for calm and patience in law reform. He sees the advantage of the long gestation period offered by the Law Commission’s methods of first issuing a public and tentative consultation period, enabling the Commission to identify not only the weaknesses in its own [provisional view] but to see where compromise may be needed to obtain consensus’; and he notes that the technique also has ‘a wide educational effect’ prompting discussion both formal and informal. And it gives time to identify ‘the strength or weakness of those who will sustain unremitting hostility to proposals and alerts those who wish to support [the proposals] to the nature of the recalcitrant opposition. Putting it in the psycho-analytic framework which has so evident an influence on him, he sees the traditional role of the political process as being to ‘obviate conflict by the reduction of tension levels in our society’. But he believes that this is under threat because of changes in nature of the political process. In particular, what he describes as the decay of Party and the growth of lobby – in effect that the Party tradition involved ‘inevitable restraints’ that must come with membership of a party (always to some extent a coalition) whereas the growth of a single issue lobby has led to tunnel vision, the demand for instant results. (17)
Apart from being responsible for the legislation identified in Cretney’s summary, which earned him the accolade of having introduced more Private Member Acts in the 20th Century than any other back-bench politician, Leo Abse led the parliamentary campaign for the final abolition of capital punishment (1969), twice introduced (in 1964 and 1969) infanticide Bills to amend the law relating to child murder, and also initiated the first full-scale Commons debates on genetic engineering, in vitro fertilisation and, as part of his anti-nuclear energy campaign, two debates on the future of Windscale.
Legal and kindred activities
On demobilisation, with the aid of an ex-serviceman’s grant and a law-school correspondence course, he qualified as a solicitor and successfully set up his own practice - initially based upon a reputation gained as a defence lawyer in criminal cases; he was to be the first solicitor to be granted audience in the High Court in 1986 when, on his own behalf and 20 other MPs who had opposed the Falklands War, he successfully claimed damages from those who had libellously defamed them. It was as a socialist lawyer that the Housing Minister unorthodoxly called upon his aid to draft the Bill that his civil servants were unable, or unwilling, to provide giving relief to oppressed leaseholders; the draft, almost untouched, became the Leasehold Reform Act of 1967 (18).
He accepted, in 1966, an invitation from the Home Secretary to serve on the Home Office Advisory Committee on Penal Affairs and participated in that committee’s controversial recommendations, many ultimately implemented, relating to maximum security prisons. In 1964 he became a member of the Council of the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency (since re-named The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and integrated into King’s College London); he remains an Honorary Vice-President and wrote the foreword to the history of the ISTD, published in 1992 by Amberwell Graphics. The law practice he founded in Cardiff still retains his name and is one of the largest in Wales.
Welsh Affairs
Representing a Welsh constituency, much of his parliamentary life was devoted to Welsh affairs, particularly those relating to health and housing issues. From 1976 until 1987 he was chairman of the all-party Welsh parliamentary party; in 1980 he became the first chairman of the newly-created Select Committee on Welsh Affairs which produced the report which substantially helped to bring about the establishment of the Welsh language television channel. A fierce opponent of what he regarded as the excesses of the Welsh Nationalist Party, he, together with Neil Kinnock, successfully led the anti-devolution campaign in the 1979 constitutional referendum.
Literary career
In 1973, while in Parliament, he published his first work, Private Member: A Psycho- analytically Oriented Study of Contemporary Politics. Over the last twenty years since his retirement from the Commons he has written a collection of works all bearing the impress of psychoanalytical findings. His unremitting hostility to the Thatcher/Blair ethos has been expressed in his psycho-biography of Margaret Thatcher (Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, 1989) and that of Blair (The Man Behind the Smile: Tony Blair and the Politics of Perversion 1996, followed by Tony Blair: The Man Who Lost His Smile, 2003). In 1994 his study of the German psyche (Wotan, My Enemy: Can Britain Live with the Germans in the European Union?) brought him the award of the Wingate Prize. In 2000 his Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love, which included a study of President Clinton’s fall, received considerable attention in the USA. His latest work, The Bi-Sexuality of Daniel Defoe (2006) has been widely praised by literary critics. He is presently engaged in what he anticipates will be his valedictory work, a collection of Freudian commentaries on intriguing Bible stories.
Other background information
Chairman of the Welsh branch of Poale Zion (Socialist Zionist Organisation) (1951-1953); declared ‘best-dressed man in Britain’ by the Clothing Federation (1962); President of the National Council for the Divorced & Separated (1974-1992); long-time member of The Savile Club; prompted by his ownership of a holiday home in Tuscany, he has declared in Who’s Who his recreation to be Italian wines;
Interviews recently given
‘Growing old disgracefully’, Daily Telegraph, 12.12.2006; ‘Meet the man who changed your world’, Gay Times, August 2007; ‘The life and times of Leo Abse’, BBC Radio Wales & BBC Wales TV, June 2008; ‘Nonagenarians’, The Economist-Intelligent Life, June 2008.
Footnotes:
1 The firm which he founded (now Leo Abse and Cohen) is now 150 strong, and practises from offices in Swansea and Newport as well as Cardiff.
2 Leo Abse celebrated his 90th birthday on 22nd April 2007: he remains a productive author, publishing books on literary, political and psycho-analytical topics.
3 This account is based largely on Official Report (HC) 5 July 1944, vol.401,col. 1136; and 4 October 1944, vol. 403, cols 1090–1100. See also L Abse, Private Member, (1973) pp 40-41
4 See Parliament and Conscience, by PG Richards (1970), p. 157
5 He appreciated that the Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act 1971 was the price which had to be paid for reform of the ground, he attempted to remedy some of the damage in 1985 …
6 Who were persuaded to allow more time for votes to take place.
7 See L Abse, Private Member, (1973) pp 243-247
8 Report on the departmental Committee on the Adoption of Children (1972) Cmnd. 5107
9 See L Abse, Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love (2000)p.
10 ‘a remarkable achievement for a Private Member without official assistance’: SM Cretney, Law, Law Reform and the Family (1998), p. 704; see also D Owen, Time to Declare (1992) p. 2; L Abse, Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love, p.
11 See Abse’s perceptive essay ‘The Politics of In Vitro Fertilization in Britain’, in In Vitro Fertilization, Past, Present, Future, S Fishel and EM Symonds (eds) (1986) p.p207-227.
12 L Abse, Private Member, (1973), p. 246
13 L Abse, Private Member, (1973), p. 193
14 See SM Cretney, (1970) 33 MLR 534
15 L Abse, Private Member, (1973), p. 193
16 Parliament and Conscience, PG Richards (1970), p. 158
17 L. Abse, Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love (2000), L Abse, Private Member, (1973)
18 Abse, L, Private Member, pp.142-144.